Sometimes, at my job, someone will come up to me and let me know that something is amiss in one of the public restrooms. About half the time it's not too bad: out of toilet paper, somebody left something in there, needs air freshener, etc. The other half of the time you're stuck dealing with a clog or an overflowing urinal or the like. The bad news is that there is no designated person to clean up these messes; if you're the one who gets informed of it, you're the one who gets to deal with it.
Today, just after lunch, I got notified by a customer that there was a "situation" in the women's handicap stall and that it was "disgusting." I trudged out there and opened the stall door only to be confronted by a literal shitstorm: a swirling cloud of diarrhea filling the bowl to the absolute top, with a clod of bloody toilet paper floating in the middle like an eye. This was not something that I wanted to deal with, and, more importantly, I wasn't sure how to deal with it. A plunger was my first thought, but I worried about breaking the delicate poo meniscus and trapping myself under a waterfall of excrement. I thought about digging around in there with a straightened-out hanger the way my mom taught us to do when we'd gotten a little Charmin-happy at home, but rooting around in feces when the library doesn't even provide me with health insurance just felt like an over-extension. The longer I stared (why couldn't I stop staring?), the less I could think of anything to do.
Now, people I work with are usually totally gung-ho about these kinds of things; I myself have picked up all manor of unsavory objects and even mopped up pee from the mens' room. I understand that we all need to do our part, but something about that gloppy, choleral toilet bowl was just too much for me. I felt bad. Does not wanting to clean up a strangers diarrhea make me stuck-up? Is this what I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of my life if I stay in this profession? Was the woman who reported the mess also the perpetrator? I may never know, because in the end, I did what I'd really wanted to do all along: I slapped up an "out of order" sign and taped the stall door shut.
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4 comments:
Nice work with the sign. That's so ridiculous that you are expected to deal with janitorial duties. It's not stuck-up - if you had been told when you interviewed "Oh, by the way, you have to clean the bathroom every day with varying degrees of grodiness ranging from replacing toilet paper to shitstorm" you probably wouldn't have taken the job.
If it was known that the librarians there had to deal with that they wouldn't get so many applicants and maybe would hire a janitor...
What we're supposed to do is: Close the bathroom. Especially if security isn't there to deal with it. We haven't been trained in the bloodborne pathogens course so we're not supposed to deal with anything bloody or bodily fluid related. After closing the bathroom, you're supposed to call Master Clean/property management downtown and they send someone to deal with it.
Ask Rebecca about the shit she had to clean up in the Hilltop bathroom, and the after storm that arose after she did so. Because she wasn't supposed to clean it up! She's not properly trained!
Yeah, we just lock the outside door and put up a sign. Once someone messes up the bathroom, nobody gets to use it for the rest of the day. I mean, I've cleaned up my share of bodily fluids (sans proper training) if it isn't too much, but something like that is just plain ridiculous. Don't feel guilty about putting up a sign; we don't get paid enough to clean up other people's shit. Literally.
If I had my way... I would rub their nose in it.
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